“How can it not open!” Atiya panicked.
She’d led them to this storage room. If the keys inside couldn’t open the handcuffs, it meant she’d been deceived and had wasted the entire team’s time.
Adrian endured the discomfort, turning it two more times before yanking it out and throwing the key on the ground.
His hand was still trembling.
“Hey!” Lucas grabbed Adrian’s hand. The trembling transmitted through his palm—the temperature in Adrian’s hand seemed to be sucked away.
Adrian glanced at him. Lucas thought he was fussing about the form of address again and reluctantly whined: “Brother, brother.”
Adrian raised an eyebrow.
He’d just forgotten about the address issue—he was just surprised that Lucas was warming his hand.
But… whatever.
Fata: “What do we do now? Without keys, we’ll have to take Mad Clown back and use the guild’s professional equipment to remove the handcuffs. Taking just Mad Clown across the sea chain bridge is manageable, but what about those Utopians?”
Their entire group were all Awakened. Awakened were almost helpless against rare lead ore. Forget crossing the sea chain bridge—even getting from the prison’s bottom level up was now a problem.
If they had keys to free the third-floor Utopians’ restraints, they could use their abilities to take their compatriots away, which would greatly reduce Black Lantern Society’s pressure.
Otherwise, sending dozens or hundreds of Utopians to the surface one by one was nearly impossible.
Atiya was at a loss.
“Did I expose myself and they urgently switched the keys? It’s all my fault!”
If she’d been more careful and not greedily tried to memorize the password, maybe the guards wouldn’t have discovered her.
What was the big deal about not having the password? Black Lantern Society had guns—at worst they could shatter the tempered glass to get the keys.
“No.” Lance carefully observed the dense rows of keys in the huge safe.
The situation was urgent, leaving him little time to think. He had to quickly find a solution.
“When you were discovered, Benbu was fighting us intensely, Asmodeus was dealing with Lucas and Adrian, Si Hongche had already turned traitor—none of them had time to make arrangements. From what the guards said, Benbu still hasn’t returned since escaping, Asmodeus is dead, and Si Hongche is simply lost in illusion… Besides, they actually didn’t need to switch anything—they could have just had the old madman transfer the storage room.”
“Look carefully.” Adrian’s tone was impatient. Though he currently lacked team consciousness and moral principles, his intelligence remained. He indicated the key lanyards with his gaze. “Whether the key surfaces or lanyards, they all show signs of long-term use. I don’t think they had the leisure to artificially age them.”
Lance nodded, his gaze sweeping over rows of numbers: “These numbers are all composed of letters and digits. The number of keys should correspond to the prison’s total population. So the most likely possibility is that these numbers use an encryption method—if we find the pattern, we can arrange them in the correct order.”
Dream Witch looked blank: “Then what do we do? We can’t contact Duma now, and isn’t encryption a computer’s job?”
Lance was momentarily silent too.
If the other side used modern cryptographic methods for encryption, even with Duma’s unlimited computing power, brute force decryption would take time.
Zhan Pingchuan came over, puzzled: “Is it that complicated? I remember elementary school math competition classes had similar pattern problems.”
Lance and Adrian both looked at Zhan Pingchuan.
Adrian recalled the past, ruthlessly commenting: “Did you solve even one problem back then? I only remember you making ten math competition teachers break down.”
Lucas: “Damn, I only made five cry back then.”
“…” Zhan Pingchuan touched his nose. Who would study such boring stuff in their most energetic years? He’d long since ditched the teachers to go play.
But Lance’s eyes lit up. He hugged Zhan Pingchuan forcefully, giving him a heavy kiss on the lips: “Husband, you’re right!”
Zhan Pingchuan was kissed senseless: “Huh?”
Lance: “A prison that’s existed for nearly a century with almost no escape incidents has no reason to upgrade systems. They must have continued using the most outdated methods.”
“Either each time they use keys, they input the numbers into a computer and calculate the unique corresponding ciphertext using a pre-set one-way function, or they use some special codebook to replace letters and numbers for encryption, or they simply used the most basic classical cryptography—Caesar cipher.”
“Even these would be too troublesome for a fortress-like prison with low-quality guards. They probably only used extremely simple encryption.”
AGW Special Dangerous Death Row Prison was a place where anyone with any prospects wouldn’t want to work.
From the fighting, you could see that these guards’ behavior and verbal quality were really no different from the imprisoned criminals—the Federation government was simply using evil to control evil.
For such a group, complex and troublesome encryption methods would only become a burden and earn their disdain. They would constantly simplify their own work.
“I can’t be completely certain, but we can try.”
Lance looked at all the numbers again.
Obviously they had patterns. Keys hanging in the same row all had one completely identical letter, which he guessed represented the floor level.
Looking at the whole thing, the first two letters of each row of keys only had twelve combination patterns, so these two letters most likely represented corridor numbers.
Finally was a long string of digits—unsurprisingly, that would be the cell door number.
And the dots in parentheses after the numbers should correspond to different shackles in one cell.
Adrian: “But the numbers aren’t text, so there’s no way to use frequency analysis.”
The most classic way to crack Caesar cipher was by counting the frequency of different symbols appearing, deducing plaintext from ciphertext.
Because people discovered that in a passage, the letter ‘e’ appeared most frequently, so once you determined the letter replacing ‘e’, you could deduce all letters from the alphabetical order.
Lance: “But we already have one completely accurate reference—the key to the old madman’s door.”
Lance looked at Atiya as he spoke.
Atiya was confused: “What do you mean?”
Zhan Pingchuan understood: “My baby wants to ask if you remember where they hung the old madman’s door key.”
Atiya had an epiphany: “Oh! Here.”
She immediately pointed to the third-to-last position in the seventh row.
Adrian: “So the letter T represents underground level nine.”
The ninth underground level’s key was arranged in the seventh row position—was it extrapolated from this?
Lance gripped Mad Clown’s wrist, examining the rare lead ore handcuffs up and down. Fortunately, his reaction to rare lead ore was weak, so he could carefully handle and observe them.
“As I expected, there are raised dots under the handcuffs, which should correspond to the dot count in parentheses after the keys, so we can narrow the range further.”
Different floors in this prison held different numbers of people per cell—some floors had six or seven people per cell, others only two.
Just by looking at the dot count, they could determine the seventh floor holding Utopians, because among all the keys, only the fourth row with letter R had keys with up to seven dots.
And Mad Clown’s second floor had only two or three people per cell, while keys with a maximum of three dots were all hung in the first and second rows.
“Seventh floor cells are R, ninth floor cells are T, so second floor cells would be M in the first row, and third floor cells would be N in the second row.”
“According to Oliver, the prison is shaped like a Roman colosseum, with corridors radiating outward from the central well. We know the old madman’s corridor number is LM, representing twelve, but we don’t know if corridors are numbered clockwise or counterclockwise.”
“But that’s fine. Mad Clown’s cell has two people, and his key has one dot. We can find all keys with only one dot among first-row cells with a maximum of two dots, and try them one by one.”
As soon as Lance finished speaking, Zhan Pingchuan, Fata, Atiya, Ling Qi, and Dream Witch began picking keys with one dot.
Dream Witch picked while grumbling: “Lucas, remember this—I used ten years’ worth of brain cells to follow my brother’s logic. You must wear matching pajamas for a month!”
Fata: “You must eat my new medicine for a month!”
Lucas: “…I haven’t even caught up yet, what did I say!”
Finally, Zhan Pingchuan used barriers to make a small box, containing 420 keys total.
“Three seconds per key, starting now. It’ll take at most 21 minutes to try them all. If we’re lucky enough, we might—”
Before Lance could finish, Zhan Pingchuan impulsively took out a key and tremblingly inserted it into the keyhole.
“I’m quick, let me go first!”
Click.
Zhan Pingchuan turned the key, and the next second, the lock tongue popped open with a “snap,” the rare lead ore handcuffs falling straight to the ground.
Zhan Pingchuan was so startled he shook: “Holy shit!”
Lance: “…” Could someone really be this lucky?
Everyone: “…” Young Madam living well all these years really had something special.
Lucas hadn’t understood anything Lance said the whole time. He just saw Zhan Pingchuan pull out a key from the mountain of keys like reaching into a bag, easily opening the handcuffs.
Lucas sighed: “Amazing, brother-in-law. I should have let you find it earlier. Your uncle is useless!”
Adrian: “.”
He took the key from Zhan Pingchuan, had Lucas lie on his shoulder, then worked on opening the heavy ankle shackles.
Lucas was extremely excited, his toes moving restlessly with excitement as he kept patting Adrian’s back: “Hurry, hurry.”
Once the rare lead ore was removed, he could use [Shadow Anchoring]—then he’d be free to come and go, and no one could do anything to him!
“Don’t move around!” Adrian raised his hand and gave his butt a hard smack.
“Mmph!” Lucas straightened up, pouting with his face completely red as he quieted down.
The dark bastard really had no morals—he was twenty-six years old, why should he be spanked by his brother?
When the light side awakened, he’d definitely bully him back hard, making Adrian wash his socks by hand and expose his wings for him to pluck feathers!
With a crisp sound, the ankle shackles fell, and Lucas’s ability returned to his body.
Lance breathed a sigh of relief: “Good. Now that we know the corridor numbers for the old madman and Lucas, we can deduce the keys needed for the third-floor Utopians.”
##
(advanced chapters available on kofi)
Prisha On IMMFBCG Chapter 2